Assessment Manager

[beeswax]

...after that short break.

I need some feedback from people using Assessment Manager in their schools before we go down that road. Do you, or more importantly, admin staff, find it easy to use? Are there any glitches? Does it slope off to the pub at 1:35pm on a Friday and return with a hangover and a dry mouth Monday lunchtime? You know the form.

thanks in advance,

beeswax

[woody]

I don't know much persnonally about it myself, but I can relate the gist of comments from the staff who do use it.

 

Apparently, it is reasonably functional, but you do have to go round the houses a bit to get what you want out of it. There is quite a bit of work involved initially to bring information through, and we had to buy some local sims consultancy time to get us on the road.

 

Th word on the street is, there are better apps out there than assman (ignore the pun) but if you already use sims and it's payed for, it will probably be cheaper to go with it.

 

Hope this is of some help, though probably not!

[russdev]

agree above staff/head all say its rubbish software... bt if you have paid for sims then might as well use it...

 

Russ

[Guest metalmonkey]

The application does the job but doesn't necessarily make it easy or do it well.

 

If you want reporting (tracking, school reports) then A/M isn't a good application.

 

For us, printing takes 5 minutes per sheet (no typo there) and will, for us, take 4 computers all night to print a year group.

 

It uses MS Word to print, but doesn't print them all into one document or give you print preview, so you might print all your reports then find they are all wrong. Or worse still - but very common, they have spelling mistakes or bad grammar which means a re-print.

 

The actual entry of data is also appalling. If you imagine a spreadsheet with column A being the pupils names and the various Assessment marks in columns B to M. The screen is fairly small so you have to scroll from left to right to enter each pupils scores. Not too bad but unfortunately Capita doesn't have the brains to work out that once you start scrolling left to right, you lose the names. So you have no idea whose scores you are entering. You have to keep scrolling back each time.

 

There is very little multi-selecting in the application as well. If you are specifying the categories for aspects, you might have 30 or so. In A/M you can't select the whole lot and change them, you have to manually do each one.

 

Apparently Version 7 will be the answer to our prayers. But then, they said that about version 6!